In Cloud Computing, It Pays To Commit

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.

451 Research recently released the latest update to their Cloud Price Index. The basic cost of renting from one of the big public cloud providers* has fallen just over 2% since the Index began in October 2014. For those who are willing to commit to buying cloud-based resources for months or years at a time, prices fall dramatically: 451 Research reports a 44% saving over the on-demand price, in the best case.

At a time when commentators have cited recently announced increases to Microsoft’s pricing in some regions, 451 Research’s numbers indicate that — overall — the downward trend in cloud pricing continues. A 2% fall in 10 months is hardly a ‘race to the bottom,’ but the direction appears inexorably downward. This is not a surprise…

What is noteworthy is that the 2% figure represents 451 Research’s attempt to model price across an entire portfolio of services, including compute, storage, networking and higher-level services. While the cloud providers themselves might like us to fixate on more dramatic 43% cuts in outbound bandwidth costs or 30% reductions in the price of the smallest virtual machines, real workloads combine a number of moving parts and don’t really see such dramatic reductions in the monthly bill…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmiller/2015/07/19/in-cloud-computing-it-pays-to-commit/